Sean Ledwith looks behind the mythology on the 50th anniversary of John F Kennedy's assassination

50 years since the assasination of John F Kennedy

November 22nd of this year marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the 35th President of the US, John Kennedy. TV and radio schedules are already filling up with sensationalist and speculative documentaries exploring the circumstances of his death in Dallas. We can also expect a plethora of newspaper and magazine articles mourning the alleged loss of American liberalism's fallen hero and how the US would be a different and better place today if he had lived. Horror writer, Stephen King's latest novel,11/22/63, is written in this vein of misplaced nostalgia. The plot revolves around a time-travel attempt to prevent Kennedy's assassination and avert the tumultuous history of the rest of the 1960s:

'Or what about Vietnam? Johnson was the one who started all the insane escalation. Kennedy might have changed his mind. Johnson and Nixon were incapable of that. Thanks to them, we lost almost sixty thousand American soldiers in Nam. The Vietnamese, North and South, lost millions. Is the butcher’s bill that high if Kennedy doesn’t die in Dallas?'

King's premise is the widely accepted fallacy that Kennedy represented a more enlightened and sophisticated quality of leadership than Presidents such as LBJ, Nixon and Reagan who would follow him. In fact, a more accurate estimation of JFK was reflected in Malcolm X's infamous reaction to the assassination as ‘a case of the chickens coming home to roost’.

Malcolm was obliquely referring to the now undisputed fact that Kennedy himself was the focus of numerous conspiracies - not as the target but as the originator. Whatever the truth of Kennedy's assassination, what is fully documented is that at the same time the latest of his plots to assassinate Cuban revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro, was in operation. This was just one of a string of illegal and reckless initiatives pursued by Kennedy during his time in the White House that are comparable to any of the nefarious schemes of later Presidents. The heroic image manufactured by his hagiographers after 1963 has also been stripped away by numerous revelations about vote-rigging and womanising that have exposed JFK as little more than just another venal capitalist politician. The fact that he was younger and had better speech-writers than his successors should not obscure the conservative and pro-imperialist agenda he unwaveringly pursued before and during his Presidency.

Conservative roots

Kennedy's political roots sit uneasily with his posthumous liberal aura. His father, Joseph, had made his fortune out of bootlegging in the Prohibition era, used insider trading to make a killing out of the Wall Street Crash and then manoeuvred himself into being appointed US Ambassador to the UK. Kennedy Snr, however, was unceremoniously fired from this position at the outbreak of WW2 for his thinly-veiled support for Hitler. Thereafter, JFK and his brothers were the willing pawns of their father's displaced ambition to be President.

Kennedy was elected to Congress at the end of WW2 and promptly became associated with the McCarthyist faction in US politics that were engaged in a ruthless and paranoid purge of leftists from the media and the labour movement. The undisguised plan to win the White House came to a climax in the 1960 election. Kennedy famously got the better of Nixon in the first-ever televised Presidential debate - although tellingly most radio listeners perceived the latter to be the more convincing performer. Ironically, JFK's appeal was partly based on him actually being further to the right on foreign policy than Nixon. Kennedy exaggerated data about Russian nuclear capability in order to accuse his rival of condoning a missile gap that disadvantaged the US.

Kennedy also cleverly made a sympathetic phone call to the then incarcerated Martin Luther King - although this was only after been reluctantly talked into by his advisers.

Even with these tactical advantages, Kennedy’s win was one of the narrowest in history and is still overshadowed by allegations of vote-rigging.

Kennedy's counter-revolution

Castro survived over 600 assassination attempts since becoming the Prime Minister of Cuba

JFK’s first key decision upon entering the White House in 1961 was to authorise the implementation of his Republican predecessor's plan to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba with a CIA-funded invasion. The operation descended into an embarrassing and costly fiasco as the so-called rebels were routed at the Bay of Pigs on the Cuban coast. Kennedy, like the rest of the US ruling class ,had overlooked the fact that the revolutionary regime had popular support at that time as it had replaced a pro-American stooge just a couple of years earlier. The motley anti-Castro forces cobbled together by the President and his team were no better than the brutal Contras that Reagan would later use to try to undermine the Nicaraguan Revolution in the 1980s. The humiliation inflicted on Kennedy provoked him into a vengeful and secret war against Castro-known as Operation Mongoose-that relied on increasingly desperate and bizarre methods, including exploding cigars and poisoned milkshakes

Missile Madness

JFK's counter-revolutionary instincts ultimately brought the world to the brink of nuclear apocalypse. Castro eventually turned to the Russians to protect himself against the President's plots and agreed to their decision to install nuclear missiles on Cuba in 1962. Kennedy's subsequent handling of the Missile Crisis is usually portrayed by his apologists as his finest hour and as an exemplary piece of steely statesmanship. The crisis was only defused, however, by a secret deal between JFK and the Russian leader, Khrushchev, to withdraw US missiles from Turkey in return for the latter dismantling the ones in Cuba. Kennedy was happy to indulge in the global acclaim without publicising the inconvenient details of the negotiations. For the tense thirteen days of the crisis, the President had seriously contemplated an attack on Russian forces as a viable option. Kennedy and his brother, Robert, were willing to devise any deception to justify an escalation. A later memoir by one of the participants in JFK'S team recalled:

'If the choice was to attack, the president still preferred a surgical strike at the missiles alone, but he told the chiefs to plan also for a full-scale invasion. Robert Kennedy even strained to find a pretext for invasion. He toyed with the thought of staging a fake attack on the American naval base at Guantanamo or staging another ship disaster in Havana–”sink the Maine again, or something.'

Escalation in Vietnam

Kennedy’s policy in South East Asia was equally blundering and ultimately catastrophic. The notion that he would have pursued a different policy regarding Vietnam is tenuous at best and overlooks the fact that Kennedy was the President who authorised the first major escalation of the conflict at the start of his administration. He increased the number of US troops deployed in Vietnam from 400 to 18,000 and also approved the first use of napalm and defoliation as legitimate methods of war. All these were designed to prop up the right-wing dictator of South Vietnam, Diem, in the same manner later Presidents such as Reagan would shore up pro-American despots around the globe. Noam Chomsky notes:

‘In internal discussion, Kennedy's consistent position was that everyone must "focus on winning the war." There can be no withdrawal without victory; the stakes are far too high. One can accuse the President of no duplicity. His public rhetoric accords closely with his stand in internal discussion’.

A brake on Civil Rights

Continuity with the establishment agenda also characterised Kennedy’s domestic policy. After his opportunistic support for Martin Luther King in the 1960 election, JFK backpedalled on facilitating the Civil Rights movement. The Freedom Riders who courageously confronted segregation in the southern states received no support from the White House, and in fact Kennedy went out of his way to thwart their campaign of direct action. King, the figurehead of the movement, was the target of FBI phone-tapping, authorised by the President. The March on Washington that climaxed with King’s legendary 'I have a dream' speech was initially blocked by Kennedy and then only authorised after King’s warning that semi-insurrection would be the inevitable result if the march was cancelled. Civil Rights activist, Roger Wilkins, observed:

'The Kennedys wanted it both ways. They wanted to appear to be our friends and they wanted to be the brake on our movement…'

Malcolm X‘s controversial reaction to Kennedy’s assassination encapsulated the growing suspicion of many black Americans that the President’s agenda was based solely on manipulating the movement for electoral gain.

After Kennedy

Shortly after JFK’s assassination the US lurched into a period of urban uprisings and student protest. Kennedy’s political supporters generated a notion that this could have been avoided if he had not gone to Dallas in 1963. It is equally likely, however, that he might have been forced out of office by the personal scandals that were starting to become common knowledge in the Washington media. More importantly, we should not accept the dominant image of the post-Kennedy era as a time of political despair. In reality, it marked the renaissance of American radicalism with groups such as the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society and the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement seizing the political initiative. These groups and others represent a legacy that is really worth commemorating

vrijdag 22 november 2013

16 Mind-Blowing Facts About Who Really Killed JFK

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

22 November 13

overnment documents declassified after the passage of the JFK Records Act in 1992 prove that the official narrative is bullshit. There is overwhelming evidence implicating the CIA and other United States intelligence agencies, as well as top military officials and corporate entities, in a complex plot to stage a coup against a president who rebelled against their wishes.

Many of the facts revealed in this article were gleaned from the book "JFK and the Unspeakable," by Jim Douglass, which has recently been endorsed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I use Douglass's book as a main source, as all of his facts are documented in over 100 pages of endnotes, citing declassified government documents contained in the National Archives building in Maryland, which are available to the public.

1. Eisenhower warned us of the "military-industrial complex" just before Kennedy took office

In January of 1961, the five-star general who commanded the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, who served as commander-in-chief during the Korean War, and who became the first Supreme Commander of NATO, spoke ominously in his final address to the nation of a sinister group of entities he called the "military-industrial complex." President Eisenhower urged Americans to stay alert and aware before this shadowy, intimately-tied group of government and corporate entities seized too much power.

"Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.... In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.... We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted." –

Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

Eisenhower's successor would go toe-to-toe with the beast Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell address on a near-daily basis. The military-industrial complex had already laid out plans for the World War II veteran and newly-elected president to pre-emptively start a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. John F. Kennedy's insistence on peace would be his downfall.

2. JFK went toe to toe with military contractor United States Steel

"My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never believed it until now." –

One of the leading companies in the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned of was United States Steel, a major contractor with the US military that controlled 25% of the entire steel market. Steelworkers staged a 4-month strike in 1959 during Eisenhower's second term, and Kennedy hoped to avoid a similar flareup during his tenure amidst fears of inflation affecting steel prices.

JFK brokered a deal between United Steel Workers (USW) and the steel industry, by which workers would get a slight wage increase while a price hike on steel would be avoided for the time being. Kennedy praised the industry for the compromise, calling it "industrial statesmanship of the highest order." But the words quoted above were spoken to his aides in private, after United States Steel CEO Roger Blough double-crossed Kennedy and informed him in the Oval Office, after the deal was done, that his company would actually be raising steel prices by 3.5 percent to $6 a ton, with other steel companies following suit.

But after Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, informed United States Steel that a new submarine construction contract would be given to a smaller steel company that hadn't agreed to the price hike, other industries that had raised prices in response to U.S. Steel's maneuver quickly withdrew their price hikes, leaving the military-industrial complex smarting from the Kennedy administration's pointed blow.

"And we call ourselves the human race." – John F. Kennedy to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, after walking out of a top-secret Pentagon briefing

The specter of nuclear war constantly loomed over the Kennedy administration. While JFK famously de-escalated the threat of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, what was not yet known was that Fidel Castro had allowed Russian missiles on Cuban land only as a deterrent against a US attack. However, Kennedy's Joint Chiefs of Staff thought the opposite, that if the United States didn't strike first, the nation would be obliterated. Plans for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union were already in place by the time Kennedy took office.

"Even though it sounds crazy to us, the CIA truly believed Kennedy was deliberately obstructing a war that had to happen," Jim Douglass told me in a phone interview. "The Soviets were seen as absolute evil, and we were the supposed 'good guys.'"

On page 237, Jim Douglass describes a top-secret "Doomsday Briefing" between Kennedy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where plans were laid out for a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union in 1963. Kennedy repeatedly pressed his top generals for an assessment of the effectiveness of such an attack, and the potential loss of life in the United States. Finally, Kennedy walked out in disgust, making the remark quoted above to his secretary of state.

At the height of cold war tensions, top military brass were deeply troubled by the prospect of a commander-in-chief who actively sought peace with an entity widely viewed as the ultimate enemy of the United States.

4. JFK secretly brokered a nuclear disarmament treaty with Khrushchev

President Kennedy and Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev secretly wrote letters to one another throughout JFK's presidency, and both eventually began to doubt their circle of advisers and appointees about the evil of the other and gradually worked toward peace. Twenty-one letters of correspondence were released by the State Department in July of 1993 after a Freedom of Information Act request was filed by a Canadian newspaper.

Kennedy had first met with Khrushchev in Vienna, and was stunned at his hard-headedness and nonchalance about the prospect of nuclear war. But Khrushchev's first letter to Kennedy, which a KGB agent covertly handed to Kennedy's press secretary, Pierre Salinger, behind the back of the Kremlin, spoke warmly of his retreat near the Black Sea and lamented conditions that could lead to the annihilation of millions. Referring to their earlier meeting in Vienna, Khrushchev said:

"The whole world hopefully expected that our meeting and a frank exchange of views would have a soothing effect, would turn relations between our countries into the correct channel and promote adoption of decisions which would give the peoples confidence that at least peace on earth will at last be secured. To my regret – and I believe, to yours – this did not happen." –

Nikita Khrushchev, September 29, 1961

From October 16 to 28, 1962, Kennedy willfully ignored his military and intelligence advisers and decided to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis without instigating nuclear war. The reason Khrushchev installed the missiles in the first place was due to his understanding that the Bay of Pigs invasion was merely the United States' first of many forays into Cuban affairs, as he wrote in his memoir.

Robert F. Kennedy, in his memoir "Thirteen Days," wrote of the tense situation his brother faced as the situation seemed to deteriorate toward nuclear war and human annihilation. At one point, two Soviet submarines were charging toward the US naval blockade, which was set up in Cuban waters to stop further shipments of warheads from the USSR. The submarines were targeted for destruction by depth charges, which would likely set off a chain of events leading to war. RFK wrote about his grey-faced brother clenching his fist and holding it over his mouth before Khrushchev ordered the subs to not challenge the blockade at the last minute.

According to White House tapes declassified in the late nineties, General Curtis LeMay of the Joint Chiefs of Staff admonished his commander-in-chief during the crisis for setting up the blockade instead of launching a pre-emptive strike. LeMay compared the blockade to the notorious appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938, saying Kennedy's decision would make him look weak to the Soviets and to the American public.

However, the crisis was resolved peacefully, largely thanks to the rapport JFK and Khrushchev established with the secret letters they sent each other through intermediaries. In October of 1963, Khrushchev signed a historic nuclear test ban treaty, which, in a letter to the president, he said would "clear the road to general and complete disarmament, and, consequently, to the delivering of peoples from the threat of war."

Khrushchev also wrote about the potential for projects the two leaders could work on, like the "conclusion of a non-aggression pact between countries of NATO and member states of the Warsaw Pact, creation of nuclear-free zones in various regions of the world, barring the further spread of the nuclear weapon, banning of launching into orbit objects bearing nuclear weapons, measures for the prevention of a surprise attack, among other steps."

However, when Soviet foreign minister Valerian Zorin handed this letter to US ambassador Foy Kohler, a cold warrior recommended by the Foreign Service whom Kennedy appointed only when his brother could offer no alternatives, Kohler commented to the State Department that the letter contained nothing of value. The State Department wrote a boilerplate two-paragraph response that remained forever in limbo, and Kennedy died a month later, never seeing the correspondence from the Soviet leader that could have ended the cold war.

5. JFK openly sided with Castro in the Cuban Revolution

"If you see him again, tell him that I'm willing to declare Goldwater my friend if that will guarantee Kennedy's re-election!" – Fidel Castro to

Jean Daniel, November 19, 1963

On October 24, 1963, French journalist Jean Daniel met with JFK in an interview arranged by Newsweek. Daniel would later interview Fidel Castro, just three days before Kennedy's assassination. US-Cuba relations had been volatile since the botched Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Castro had recently removed Fulgencio Batista, a right-wing dictator allied with the US, from office, and instead allied with the Soviet Union in the height of the cold war. The Bay of Pigs invasion was the CIA's failed ploy to push Kennedy into a corner and force him to go to war with Cuba, and by default, the Soviet Union.

President Eisenhower had already allocated $13 million to the CIA during his final year in office to authorize the training of Brigade 2506, a paramilitary group charged with overthrowing the Castro regime. Three days after Bridgade 2506 traveled from Guatemala to invade Cuba, Castro forced their surrender, prompting Kennedy to make the decision to mount a larger invasion or suffer a humiliating defeat. After the incident, Kennedy famously said he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds."

Jean Daniel's eye-opening interview with President Kennedy, roughly 2 years after the Bay of Pigs and a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, revealed that Kennedy in fact sympathized with Fidel Castro, the socialist leader that Americans were conditioned to hate. This is in spite of the fact that Kennedy ran against Nixon in the election on a platform of stiffness toward the Cuban regime.

"I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country's policies during the Batista regime.... I will even go further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries." –

Just as he did with Nikita Khrushchev, JFK used intermediaries to correspond with Castro and set up a meeting between the two leaders, subverting his own State Department. Kennedy instructed Adlai Stevenson's assistant, William Atwood, to start communicating with Cuba's UN ambassador, Carlos Lechuga. Castro was doing the same, having been urged by Khrushchev to communicate with Kennedy in an attempt to make peace. Atwood was making progress on setting up talks between the two leaders through Castro's assistant, Rene Vallejo.

On November 19, 1963, Fidel Castro appeared suddenly at Jean Daniel's hotel in Havana, prompting a six-hour conversation from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m., wanting to hear all about his conversation with Kennedy. The Cuban leader told Daniel that he believed Kennedy could be the one US president to forge world peace.

"He still has the possibility of becoming, in the eyes of history, the greatest President of the United States, the leader who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists, even in the Americas. He would then be an even greater president than Lincoln," Castro said.

On the afternoon of November 22, Jean Daniel was interviewing Castro at his home about the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Castro got a call about President Kennedy having been shot in Dallas. Upon hearing the news, Castro repeated the phrase, "Es una mala noticia (this is bad news)," three times. Upon hearing confirmation of Kennedy's death, Castro told Daniel, "Everything is changed. Everything is going to change." Lyndon Baynes Johnson put on hold any and all dialogue between Washington and Havana, despite Castro's numerous attempts to reach out and make peace.

6. JFK was secretly working to end the US occupation of Vietnam

"This war in Vietnam – it's never off my mind, it haunts me day and night… The first thing I do when I'm re-elected, I'm going to get the Americans out of Vietnam." – John F. Kennedyto next-door neighbor Larry Newman in Hyannis Port, October 20, 1963

Before delving into Vietnam, it's important to acknowledge that Kennedy has received lots of deserved criticism over his decision to deploy Agent Orange, a toxic chemical weapon developed by Monsanto, Dow Chemical and others, in Vietnam in 1962. Agent Orange was responsible for the contamination of crops and thousands of Vietnamese deaths, and will continue to cause serious health defects for generations of Vietnamese yet to be born. Agent Orange also contributed to the deaths of US soldiers who developed serious health conditions upon their return home.

But to fully understand the transition Kennedy underwent from fierce cold warrior to staunch advocate for world peace, Jim Douglass's "JFK and the Unspeakable" is a must-read. Douglass cites letters written by Thomas Merton, a monk living in Kentucky who offered harsh critiques of Kennedy's foreign policy and in-depth analysis of his complete transition from a war hawk to a peacemaker. Along with juggling the world-shaking Cuban Missile Crisis and constant tensions with the Soviet Union, Kennedy also had to deal with the prospect of either continuing to prop up the brutal and corrupt Diem regime, or allowing a coup that would oust Diem and give the Soviets an extra piece in the global chess game between the US and USSR.

In late April of 1961, General Douglas MacArthur, who commanded the Allies in the Pacific,told Kennedy: "Anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland of Asia should have his head examined." When the Joint Chiefs of Staff pressured Kennedy to up the troop presence in Vietnam and even deploy nuclear weapons, he cited the words of General MacArthur in defending his position.

In November of 1963, Kennedy told General David Shoup, commander of the Marines and the only member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff he trusted, that the first thing he'd do following the election would be to pull all troops out of Vietnam. Shoup advised his commander-in-chief, "Unless we were prepared to use a million men in a major drive, we should pull out before the war expanded beyond control." Kennedy issued National Security Action Memo (NSAM) 263 just before his death, which secretly authorized the withdrawal of 1,000 US troops from Vietnam. As history shows, NSAM 263 would never be obeyed, and the Vietnam War would escalate into an unwinnable quagmire under the LBJ administration.

7. JFK refused a 9/11-esque plot to stage terrorist attacks on US soil to be blamed on Cuba

"We could blow up a drone (unmanned) vessel anywhere in the Cuban waters.... The US could follow up with an air/sea rescue operation covered by US fighters to 'evacuate' remaining members of the non-existent crew. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation." – Operation Northwoods, March 13, 1962

In the Spring of 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a sinister, top-secret plot to create the political will to invade Cuba, called Operation Northwoods. This plan was so secretive that it couldn't be seen by even "commanders of unified or specified commands," "US officers assigned to NATO activities," or even "the Chairman, US delegation, United Nations Military Staff Committee." Upon seeing the documents, Kennedy told Joints Chiefs of Staff Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer there was no way Operation Northwoods would happen under his watch, and a few months later, subsequently denied a renewal of his chairmanship. These excerpts of the document are probably what made Kennedy say no, more than anything else:

"A series of well-coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around Guantanamo to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces."

"We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated)."

"7. Hijacking attempts of civil air and surface craft should appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the government of Cuba."

Operation Northwoods goes on to explain a detailed plan involving a CIA plane to be painted at Eglin Air Force Base to duplicate a registered civilian aircraft that would be converted to a drone. Then, "any grouping of people with a common interest" would charter a nonscheduled flight to a South American country with a flight plan that crosses Cuba.

The passengers would all be given "carefully prepared aliases" before boarding, and once their plane passed a "rendezvous point" south of Florida, the drone aircraft would proceed to be detonated by radio control over Cuban airspace after "transmitting on the international frequency a 'MAY DAY' message stating he is under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft." Meanwhile, the jet with the passengers would fly at minimum altitude back to Eglin so the military would "return the aircraft to its original status."

Every last detail was thought out for this false flag attack, including the addition of a "pre-briefed pilot" who would fly "tail-end-Charlie," or right in between the passenger plane and the drone craft. Upon crossing into Cuban airspace, the pilot would put out a distress signal that he was under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft, say he's going down, and fly back to Eglin, whereupon a new tail number would be given to his craft. The pilot would then "resume his proper identity and return to his normal place of business." Meanwhile, other surface craft would litter the waters surrounding Cuba with F-101 parts, where search ships would be sent out to find a parachute and other aircraft parts. The document states, "The pilots returning to Homestead would have a true story as far as they knew."

Despite Kennedy's steadfast refusal of their nefarious plan, the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed to keep planning "pretext operations" without Lemnitzer, who would become the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO after Kennedy's assassination.

8. Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset

Three years before the Kennedy assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald was being investigated by the CIA's Special Investigations Group (SIG), a branch of the agency's Counter-Intelligence (CI) division, headed by James Angleton between 1954 and 1974. This was confirmed in the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) questioning of Ann Egerter, a member of Angleton's staff who opened the CIA file on Lee Harvey Oswald (a "201 file" in US intel lingo) in December of 1960.

The kicker is that the CI/SIG division is only tasked with investigating current CIA agents who are potential security risks. Egerter said her office was known within the CIA as "the office that spied on spies." She further elaborated on SIG as the entity that undertook "investigations of agency employees where there was an indication of espionage."

Because CIA agents are forbidden to disclose the identity of any other agents, Oswald's true occupation could only be discerned through indirect questions directed at Egerter. One HSCA interviewer asked her what the purpose of the CI/SIG was within the agency. Through this line of questioning, it can be discerned that Lee Harvey Oswald was seen in 1960 as a security risk, making him easy to burn, for example, as a patsy in the Kennedy assassination.

Interviewer: "Please correct me if I'm wrong … it seems that the purpose of CI/SIG was very limited and that limited purpose was to investigate agency employees who for some reason were under suspicion."

Egerter: "That is correct."

Interviewer: "When a 201 file is opened, does that mean that whoever opens the file has either an intelligence interest in the individual, or, if not an intelligence interest, he thinks that the individual may present a counterintelligence risk?"

Egerter: "Well, in general, I would say that would be correct."

Interviewer: "Would there be any other reason for opening up a file?"

Egerter: "No, I can't think of one."

9. Oswald was on the FBI's payroll

In 1963, William Walter was a clerk in the FBI's New Orleans office. He told the HSCA that Lee Oswald indeed had "an informant's status with our office." Orest Pena, another FBI informant, said he saw Oswald with FBI agent Warren deBrueys on 'numerous occasions,' even stating that deBrueys physically threatened him about not revealing what he saw before Pena appeared before the Warren Commission. Oswald's friend Adrian Alba, who managed a New Orleans garage that held FBI and Secret Service cars, recalled watching Oswald approach an FBI car outside the garage and receive a white envelope that was handed to him through a cracked window before concealing it under his shirt. Alba later said Oswald "met the car again a couple of days later and talked briefly with the driver," whom Alba knew as an "FBI agent visiting New Orleans from Washington."

While in New Orleans, Oswald was working for the Reily Coffee Company, which was owned by William B. Reily, a financial supporter of the CIA-sponsored Cuban Revolutionary Council. A CIA memo dated January 31, 1964, that has since been declassified states "[Reily's] firm was of interest as of April 1949." CIA contractor Gerry Patrick Hemming also confirmed Reily's coordination with the CIA in a 1968 interview with the New Orleans District Attorney's Office, which "confirmed that William Reily had worked for the CIA for years." Reily's company was located close to the New Orleans offices of the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, and Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).

Oswald also worked in the office of a detective and former FBI agent named Guy Banister, whose office was directly across the street from the ONI and Secret Service offices. According to Daniel Campbell, an ex-Marine who spied on radical New Orleans students and gave small arms training to Cuban exiles, "Banister was a bagman for the CIA and was running guns to Alpha 66 in Miami." As you'll read later, Alpha 66 was a CIA-funded group of Cuban vigilantes plotting to overthrow Castro.

Oswald's intelligence connections may explain why he was able to summon an FBI agent so easily following his August arrest for an altercation that broke out when he was passing out pro-Castro leaflets. Oswald had written to the New York headquarters of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee about starting a New Orleans branch, and FPCC national director V.T. Lee wrote back, urging him not to cause "unnecessary incidents which frighten away prospective supporters." Oswald did the exact opposite.

On August 5, Oswald visited Carlos Bringuier at his clothing store about wanting to train Cubans to fight Castro. Bringuier was leader of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), which was later described in a 1967 CIA memorandum as "conceived, created and funded by the CIA." When E. Howard Hunt testified to the HSCA, he named David Atlee Phillips as the person in charge of the group. Though Bringuier testified to the Warren Commission that he was wary about Oswald's visit, the two CIA-connected men nevertheless staged an act of elaborate street theater that ended in a fight and subsequent arrest of the two men and three of Bringuier's friends.

While he was in jail, Oswald asked to speak to the FBI, whereupon Special Agent John Quigley met with him for an hour and a half. When Quigley testified about this incident to the Warren Commission, he said Oswald simply explained to him why he was passing out the Castro leaflets. But Harold Weisberg's book "Whitewash IV" included top-secret remarks from chief Warren Commission council J. Lee Rankin, which were declassified after an extensive legal battle. Rankin's statement revealed the actual reason for Oswald's meeting with Quigley. According to the session transcript, Rankin stated Oswald was "employed by the FBI at $200 a month from September of 1962 up to the time of the assassination."

In contrast to the
standard conception of the media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in
their search for truth and their independence of authority, we have spelled out
and applied a propaganda model that indeed sees the media as serving a
‘societal purpose,’ but not that of enabling the public to assert meaningful
control over the political process by providing them with the information
needed for the intelligent discharge of political responsibilities. On the
contrary, a propaganda model suggests that the ‘societal purpose’ of the media
is to inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of
privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state. The media
serve this purpose in many ways: through selection of topics, distribution of
concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and tone, and
by keeping debate within the bounds of acceptable premises.

As we have stressed
throughout this book, the U.S. media do not function in the manner of the
propaganda system of a totalitarian state. Rather, they permit -- indeed,
encourage -- spirited debate, criticism, and dissent, as long as these remain
faithfully within the system of presuppositions and principles that constitute
an elite consensus, a system so powerful as to be internalized largely without
awareness. No one instructed the media to focus on Cambodia and ignore East
Timor. They gravitated naturally to the Khmer Rouge and discussed them freely
-- just as they naturally suppressed information on Indonesian atrocities in
East Timor and U.S. responsibility for the agression and massacres. In the process,
the media provided neither facts nor analyses that would have enabled the
public to understand the issues or the bases of government policies toward
Cambodia and Timor, and they thereby assured that the public could not exert
any meaningful influence on the decisions that were made. This is quite typical
of the actual ‘societal purpose’ of the media on matters that are of significance
for established power; not ‘enabling the public to assert meaningful control
over the political process,’ but rather averting any such danger. In these
cases, as in numerous others, the public was managed and mobilized from above,
by means of the media's highly selective messages and evasions. As noted by media
analyst W. Lance Bennett: ‘the public is exposed to powerful persuasive
messages from above and is unable to communicate meaningfully through the media
in response to the messages... Leaders have usurped enormous amounts of
political power and reduced popular control over the political system by using
the media to generate support, compliance, and just plain confusion among the
public.'

Given the imperatives of
corporate organization and the workings of the various filters, conformity to
the needs and interests of privileged sectors is essential to succes. In the
media, as in other major institutions, those who do not display the requistite
values and perspectives will be regarded as ‘irresponsible’, ‘ideological’, or
otherwise aberrant, and will tend to fall by the wayside. While there may be a
small number of exeptions, the pattern is pervasive, and expected. Those who
adapt, perhaps quite honestly, will then be free to express themselves with
little managerial control, and they will be able to assert, accurately, that
they perceive no pressures to conform. The media are indeed free -- for those
who adopt the principles required for ‘societal purpose.’

The technical structure
of the media virtually compels adherence to conventional thoughts; nothing else
can be expressed between two commercials, or in seven hunderd words, without
the appearance of absurdity that is difficult to avoid when one is challenging
familiar doctrine with no opportunity to develop facts or argument... The
critic must also be prepared to face a defamation apparatus against which there
is little recourse, an inhibiting factor that is not insubstantial... The
result is a powerful system of induced conformity to the needs of privilege and
power. In sum, the mass media of the United States are effective and powerful
ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function
by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship,
and without significant overt coercion. This propaganda system has become even
more efficient in recent decades with the rise of the national television
networks, greater mass-media concentration, right-wing pressures on public
radio and television, and the growth in scope and sophistication of public
relations and news management.